Various customer premises equipment has been developed to facilitate access to numerous network communication and processing services. For example, modems, routers, and bridges can facilitate access to network services through various central office equipment. Typically, customer premises equipment must be configured to interact with various other network elements both in terms of the logical signal connection—or virtual channel—between the customer premises equipment and the service provider, and in terms of the encapsulation protocol used by the service provider.
Unfortunately, different network service providers offer services using several different protocols on any number of possible signal paths. Currently, no uniform standard specifying applicable signal paths or protocols has been established for service provision to customer premises equipment. As a result, configuration of customer premises equipment to operate with any particular service provider's network equipment can prove a time consuming and frustrating task for users of the customer premises equipment.
Some manufacturers of customer premises equipment have included predefined look-up tables with their equipment to assist users in configuring the customer premises equipment. This approach suffers for several reasons. For example, the predefined tables quickly become outdated as new service providers emerge and existing service providers vary the virtual channels and/or protocols supported. As a result, the predefined tables can be outdated before the product is even sold to the customer. In addition, these approaches require the user to input information used to cross-reference the configuration information in the look-up tables. This provides another chance for user error and/or system inoperability if the user does not have the required cross-reference information.